Golden's Rule

Christa

Chapter 1

Out of the Game

COACH STOVER’S FACE was as red as the Slimshine Urgent! lipstick that she wouldn’t let me wear on the court. Intense? Major. And believe me, red was not her most flattering shade.

I mean, gimme a break. It wasn’t like we were playing in the WNBA finals, or even the Olympics, which was my goal five years down the line. No, this was girls’ basketball in suburban Montclair: Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School against Benton Middle School. There were maybe thirty people in the stands, and they were barely paying attention. Plus, we were winning, 28–14, and there were only four minutes left in the game. We couldn’t lose, right?

But Coach Stover was going on and on. This was our chance. Don’t let up. Stay aggressive on defense. Wait for the open shot. As she ranted, she kept jabbing her finger into the playbook. Bang, bang, bang. Mouth going a mile a minute.

I looked up into the stands, but not for my folks. I had gotten beyond that disappointment long ago. Both my parents were lawyers, and they were both at their jobs. My mom was in Manhattan, some thirty miles away. She worked for the New York State Department of Finance, where she was deputy director of the trial division. My father worked for Citibank, in their international finance division. He was in Athens, Greece, toiling away on some kind of negotiations involving olive oil. I guess it was a pretty slippery deal.

But two of my friends were in the stands watching the game, a girl and a boy from my group. We called ourselves the Magnificent Seven, or the Mag-7s for short. And while we weren’t exactly Alphas, we weren’t losers beyond repair. But contempt for the pecking order was our thing, anyway. We lived by the motto, Individuality or death. A bit on the dramatic side, true, but we were in eighth grade and it sounded pretty good at the time.

The Bengali Rose, Jasmine Shekhar, saw me looking up and waved. Jasmine was the Mag-7s’ drama queen and a freak for vintage clothing. She spent at least one day every weekend with her older sister, Indira, wandering from thrift shop to thrift shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which they considered their stomping grounds. Most kids in our class still weren’t allowed to cross the Hudson River under any circumstances without their parents, except maybe for a supervised class trip.

Next to her, Ken the Karate Kid looked up when he saw Jasmine wave. He appeared confused for a moment, like he usually did. Then he lifted his hand and grinned. Kenneth Herzog was born with one leg slightly longer than the other. Even with a built-up shoe, he had a slight limp. But his parents were great compensators. They enrolled him in martial arts classes when he was seven, and now he had a second-degree black belt.

Bottom line? It was great for us. The Mag-7s were never bullied. Not even by the toughie wannabes.

Maddie? Are you with us?

Oops. That’s me, Madison Bergamo. I smiled an of-course-I’m-listening smile. Yes, Coach?

Why don’t you describe the play I just called?

This was a totally easy question. I mean, Coach Stover called the same play during every timeout. And she got just as crazy when she called it. I remember when I first made the team, how Coach gave us a little speech about everybody getting a chance to play, and being a good sport, and it was only a game, and blah, blah, blah.

Meanwhile, we lost exactly one game the whole season and Coach Stover acted like we were responsible for global warming and international terrorism, with maybe world hunger thrown in. After the game, she wouldn’t even talk to us.

But when you’re a kid, you’re a kid. You don’t have any control over the adults who run your life. If you got a psycho for a sixth grade teacher, like Mrs. Czernowitz, you just had to adapt. Same with Coach Stover. I was graduating from middle school that year. She would be at FDR forever. The thought didn’t exactly make me sad. Sayonara, Coach.

Cynthia brings the ball down court, then passes to me. I take the ball to the weak side. If I’m double-teamed, I find the open girl. If not, I take my defender down low.

Like I said, the same play every time. But I guess I made Coach happy because she clapped me on the back as the warning buzzer belched and the referee blew the whistle.

Let’s do this for Montclair, she said.

That’s Montclair, New Jersey, right? We should do it for the town? Meanwhile, our opponent, Benton Middle School, was also located in Montclair. So winning would be as much against Montclair as for it. But who was I to argue with the coach’s logic? I took the ball out, passed it to Cynthia, and trailed her down the court. When we crossed the half-court line, Cynthia flipped the ball back.

Benton’s tallest player came out to meet me. She wore number 22 on her lime green uniform (much cooler than our tired out magenta togs) and she was maybe five-five. I was five-ten, not only the tallest girl but the tallest kid of either gender in the entire FDR Middle School—and that included a couple of teachers, too. Mostly, this was a source of embarrassment, as you might expect. I mean, gawky? Major. There were times I wanted to walk on my knees.

But not on a basketball court. Not only was I taller than my defender, I was faster, too—Maddie the Montclair Flash. I smiled at number 22—sneered is more like it—then cut to the left, dribbled twice and—

Fell flat on my face. That’s right. Ka-bam!

A second later, both teams were headed back in the other direction. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t get my right leg to work. I mean my leg didn’t hurt or anything. In fact, it felt entirely normal. Except it wouldn’t do what I told it to. My mind was going, C’mon, leg, get it together. And my leg was going, I can’t hearrrrrrrrrr you. Now I know how my mom feels when she’s telling me to clean my room and I’m turning my iPod up louder.

The referee blew the whistle at that point, and Coach Stover ran across the court. She yanked down my kneepad and started squeezing my knee and my ankle. Does this hurt? Does this?

But there wasn’t any pain. My leg wasn’t even numb, like when you sit with your leg tucked under you for too long. No, what I mostly felt was embarrassed. I mean, omigosh, I’m the star of the team and I can’t even stand on my own two feet. Puh-leeeze. I just sat there on the floor—I mean, where was I going to go?—and slowly died of embarrassment while waiting for the leg thing to pass. But it didn’t.

That’s when Coach Stover made it ten times worse. She told Cynthia to get the wheelchair from under the stands, and I was wheeled down a corridor that seemed about ten miles long. All the way to the nurse’s room on the other side of the school. Past the lockers, the lunchroom, and the library. Fortunately, this was after classes were over and the only kids still at school were geeks from the physics club. But still, word would get out. The invincible Maddie laid low by some stupid sports injury.

Talk about a hellooooooo moment. I mean, I had good grades and everything. But so what? Ninety-five percent of FDR’s students went on to college. Everybody had good grades. This was Montclair, New Jersey, where the average family in our community was considered upper middle-class. No, grades wouldn’t cut it for a five-foot-ten-inch girl in eighth grade. Basketball was my thing. I was hoping to parlay my skills into a scholarship some day, and my height was going to work to my advantage for once. I mean, the wheelchair didn’t even fit me, and I had to pull up my bad leg or it would’ve scraped the floor. I felt like a snail in a transparent shell. There was nowhere to hide—but that didn’t stop me from trying my best to hide how freaked out I was feeling inside.

Nurse Cole was a tiny woman. Her shoulders were so pointy that she looked as if she forgot to take her uniform off the hanger when she put it on in the morning. She had little round eyes and her mouth was a lipless slash that turned down at the corners. Trust me on this: Nurse Cole didn’t like kids. When I came through the door in that wheelchair, she put her hands on her hips and shook her head in disgust. She was packing a thermos and a plastic container in a tote bag, ready to go home now that the basketball game was almost over.

My, my, she said, what have we here?

Like I was an insect that had crawled out from under the baseboards.

Maddie Bergamo, I answered. I was using my polite voice, the one that says, I don’t like you any more than you like me, but I’m being civil so there’s nothing you can do about it.

And would you mind telling me what happened to you?

I fell.

Can you stand up?

Uh-uh. Like, my right leg isn’t working.

Nurse Cole’s angry glare vanished and her eyes beat a hasty retreat. Okay, that made me nervous. It seemed to me that in Nurse Cole’s opinion, most kids who came to her office were slackers who just wanted to get out of school early. Her job was to send them back to class. But she wasn’t thinking that way now.

Are you in pain?

No. I just can’t move it.

And this just happened? Out of nowhere? You didn’t feel any weakness before today? She was shooting questions at me like I shoot lay-ups at practice.

Yes, yes, and no. I wasn’t trying for snotty, but I don’t think I succeeded. Talk about a reality check. The truth was that I’d been perfectly fine until the moment my leg stopped working. And all of these questions weren’t exactly putting my mind at ease.

All right, up on the table. Nurse Cole helped me out of the wheelchair and onto an examining table, the kind with the roll of paper on one end. Not exactly chic or comfortable. Then she did exactly what Coach Stover did. She pressed my calf and my thigh, rotated my ankle, bent my knee, and rolled my hip. Everything worked fine and I could feel what she was doing, but my leg was a dead weight.

But Nurse Cole wasn’t finished. She took my temperature and checked my blood pressure. She shined a light into my eyes and had me follow her finger as she waved it back and forth. Finally, she asked me a series of questions: name the school principal, the day of the week, the month of the year. Although I couldn’t see how any of it was related to my leg, I played along.

Tuttleman, Tuesday, and March, I answered without hesitation, which I guess was reassuring, because at least she didn’t summon the paramedics. Good thing I don’t freeze on pop quizzes.

I’ll have to call one of your parents to pick you up, she finally said.

My mom’s at work, and my dad’s in Greece.

Nurse Cole’s lips curled and turned into an exasperated frown. I was annoying her, which I figured was a good sign. She was back to her normal, kid-hating self.

I didn’t ask that, Maddie. But never mind. Your mother’s work number will be on file in the principal’s office and I’ll need to consult with him anyway. Make sure you don’t go anywhere.

As if I was going to get up and sprint out the door. Only that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I was one of

those latchkey children who learn to take care of themselves. I know it’s not fashionable—the school’s Alphas would laugh in my face—but I took a lot of pride in being responsible. I picked up after myself, and I’d become a halfway decent cook. Most nights, when we didn’t order in, I made dinner. In fact, I planned to put cooking on my résumé when I applied to college. Just in case basketball, and good grades, and a killer SAT score weren’t enough. So, helpless-child-who-can’t-stand-on-her-own-two-feet was not part of my self-image. Ken the Karate Kid might be proud of the way he overcame his disability, but my dream was a basketball scholarship. I needed to run. And for that, I needed my leg to wake up.

Thankfully, the Bengali Rose showed up for support a few minutes after Nurse Cole left for the principal’s office. She asked if I was all right, but when I described what was happening to me, she changed the subject to a scarf she’d picked up for next to nothing over the weekend. That was her idea of a diversion tactic to get my mind off my leg. True, I was looking for something to distract me from my lifeless limb, but did it have to be something so hideous?

The scarf didn’t have a label and it was major-league ugly—small purple and black checks with scarlet fringes— but she was sure it was a Hermes.

I practically stole it, she announced. Congratulations, I answered, stopping short of asking if she could break back into the scene of the crime and return it to the bargain bin where it belongs. Do you mind telling me who won the game?

We did, but it was close. The team kinda fell apart when you…when you left.

The Bengali Rose was a short, pretty girl with big black eyes, a pouty mouth, a pointy little chin…and obviously a huge phobia of nurses’ offices. She looked more bugged out about being there than I was.

And to tell you the truth, she was dressed more for an art gallery opening than she was for Nurse Cole’s office. She was wearing a long blue sweater that fell to her hips, a patterned skirt that dropped to her ankles, and button-up shoes that must have been like a hundred years old. Bizarre, to say the least. But there was plenty of room for girls like Jasmine in Montclair. The town was an ethnic potpourri, with about one-third of its residents African-American, more than half Caucasian, and the rest Asian, Latino, East Indian, and other. Jasmine fit right in.

Come to think of it, I did, too. My mother is black and my father is white, but only once did I have any trouble.

That was back in fourth grade when some of the black kids started calling me Oreo, like the cookie: black on the outside, white on the inside. At first, I was devastated. I mean, I was only ten. My psyche was fragile. But then I decided that I was what I was, and I better get used to it. With my mom’s help, I had a t-shirt made up and wore it to school once a week for the rest of the year:

PROUD TO BE MULTIRACIAL

So, Jasmine said, looking for another way to change the subject, what’s up with Jason Walker?

I frowned. Well, that did it. She definitely got my mind on something else! Like a bum leg wasn’t bad enough.

I’d had a major crush on Jason going back to the beginning of seventh grade, but I couldn’t seem to catch his attention. That’s most likely because I was six inches taller than he was. But I mean, he’d eventually catch up, right? Girls mature earlier, so what’s the big deal? I even arranged to get partnered with him in science lab. He was nice and all, but he totally did not see me that way, if he saw me at all. Who knows? Maybe he never looked up. Outside of the experiment, the only thing he ever talked about was competing with his friends at Xbox video games, especially his favorites: Grand Theft Auto and Halo 2.

Okay, so he still had a few years to go before he was really eligible. And if he didn’t have those sapphire blue eyes, I wouldn’t have noticed him in the first place, either. But FDR’s spring dance was coming up in a few weeks and I’d invested too much time in Jason to find someone else now.

The funny part was that I didn’t really want to go to the dance at all. Not many of us did. In fact, nobody ever, like, actually danced. The dance was like so retro and we were way too cool. I mean, what’d we do to deserve this? But if nobody asked me, I wouldn’t have a chance to say no. It would be more like the dance was rejecting me. Plus, it seemed like most of the other girls already had dates.

I tell you, I told Jasmine, if Jason doesn’t mature soon, I’m gonna have to ask Ken.

Forget the Karate Kid. He says he’s not goin’. Even better.

Jasmine was about to respond when my right leg, the one I couldn’t move, suddenly twitched. At first, I was like, Now what? Then a minute later, my leg was back to normal. I mean one hundred percent completely normal, like nothing had ever happened.

First thing, I stood up and walked around the room. In fact, I was practically skipping when Nurse Cole bustled through the door. That was another thing about Nurse Cole. She was a great bustler. Even when she had nothing to do, she was straightening up or checking her supplies. Still, this time